Continuity: Get Backup
All companies ask their cloud vendors, "Do you back up our data?" The answer is always some variant of yes. However, the majority of cloud designs focus on backup and point-in-time failover--not archiving.
Always establish a cloud service backup and archiving schedule the same way you would for any internal resource. Start with your current vendor. Many, like CommVault and Symantec, are working to establish options for extending internal backup and archiving systems to manage cloud-based data.
All systems have outages, whether they're in house or in the cloud. Focus on what vendors will agree to in their service-level agreements vs. what your internal teams will commit to for their in-house SLAs. The "five-nines" mantra (99.999 percent) that dominates discussion among Tier 1 data vendors simply isn't heard in the cloud. At best, your uptime will be between 99.9 percent and 99.95 percent. Decide: What is the plan for the business if there's an outage? When do you implement the failover plan? Who makes the call? These are all familiar themes to business continuity pros, but with an external twist.
Software as a service should have, at minimum, manual processes documented for users. In the case of a CRM or project management application, you may want a separate cloud or in-house system that could be activated in the event of a major failure. For high-volume services, such as e-mail or EDI transactions, design a system that not only queues ongoing transactions for short outages but has the ability to fail over completely. These aren't small projects; plan to devote engineering time and funding.
Staffing: Build Your Bench
IT as a profession is at a turning point. While the cloud may be hot, there hasn't been a boom in hiring by these vendors, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Labor stats. Cloud and related hosting services companies have had flat job growth for the past year. Blame economies of scale. But just because the quantity of jobs is down doesn't mean you'll easily find IT pros who can deftly manage vendor relationships, not just technology platforms.
